“Books are bourgeois. Poets the most.”
Tall man in the stacks, peering above Das Kapital.
“You’ll come with me.”
His hand on my back, a familiar book in armpit—my mistake. The burning house, I entered:
Children I implore you
get out of the burning house now
three carts wait outside
to save you from a homeless life
relax in the village square
before the sky everything’s empty
no direction is better or worse
east is just as good as west
those who know the meaning of this
are free to go where they want
Brambled night: circle of angry faces, swinging fires, black rice sack obscuring my view.
Read someone else’s crimes: easier on the ear than one’s own.
Baba
From his morning perch atop Gansu’s yellow cliffs, the New Year arrived with the pop hiss of firecrackers set on the valley’s crowded streets. Smoke rose above rooftops like flocks of startled pigeons. Following his colleagues at the camp, every morning Wang scaled the cliff to work in the terraced fields where only the mealiest of vegetables grew: potatoes, yams, squash, winter melons. Time, now, for the Spring harvest, or so said their fluttering calendar pages, the trusted tongshu with its lengthy, mis-cited almanacs (last month there wasn’t the predicted pine’s height of snow, but three ice storms followed by the strangest summer-like January day—villagers crawled out of caves, bare arms extended to the sun as if Heaven itself bestowed this warmth). This was the season when good children and husbands returned home to eat long-life potatoes (that hot, stringy caramel sticking to teeth) and tell long-winded stories of the year interrupted only by shared laughter and sips of hot tea.
For weeks, Wang’s fellow Beijingers spoke of the New Year. How in just a few days they’d board the crowded eastbound trains to the capital. How they’d trade Gansu’s dry winds for the Gobi’s sandstorms. But not him. No, he sat every morning on his cliff looking east, wondering where he could possibly go for the holidays this year. The possibilities were numbered:
One: his danwei dormitory in Beijing, shared toilet smell wafting down the hallway, past the tattered underwear and darned socks hung to dry on copper wires strung between walls.
Two: a crumbling pingfang along the river in Cen Cang Yan, long assumed by neighboring villagers as the town’s only granary, stuffed to the ceiling with canvas bags of wheat, rice and millet, plump rats nibbling on the grains, his father meandering between Sword Temple and Square Bridge, losing his way and then finding it again with the tap of his cane.
Three: his brother’s Shanghai two-story with its dented wooden stairs, the back room where his brother and he once slept while their father and his brothers worked the grinders, those uncles long buried on Xia Gai Mountain, beaten down by the latest Revolution’s thick red calligraphy.
“Little Brother Wang,” a foot nudged his ribs through the cotton beizi shielding him from Gansu’s icy nights, the perpetual bone-chipping chill of a cave dwelling. Of course it was his colleague Xiaodong lifting him from the reverie of a morning sunrise. Xiaodong had a wife and son waiting at home for him in Beijing, eager for the New Year visit. Xiaodong had a mustache that he meticulously shaved into an up-stretched U every morning by the breakfast fire. Xiaodong had read Sun Tzu’s Art of War five times and now re-read Chairman Mao’s Strategic Problems of China’s Revolutionary War whenever he had a free moment between their work in the fields and their perfunctory meetings with the local villagers (where they puffed their chests and acted like knowledgeable city folk and the villagers slumped their shoulders, bowed feudally, and waited for them to stop talking so they could teach the urbanites how to milk goats). Xiaodong thought he knew everything about tactical warfare. Xiaodong didn’t know anything about war. But Wang didn’t have the heart to tell him. Despite the fact Wang was two years Xiaodong’s elder, Wang’s single status and lack of ‘loud-mouthed progeny’ as Xiaodong called them, made Wang a ‘Little Brother.’ Too much time had passed to correct him. Xiaodong poked Wang’s ribs again with the rubber-capped toe of his mud-caked boot.
“C’mon, Poet,” he tried. All Wang’s comrades called him ‘The Poet’ (or ‘Mr. Poet’ depending on their mood) since Li-Ming’s first letter arrived containing references to her favorite poet, Han Shan. They asked, “Did you find your tangle of cliffs? Your bird paths without trails?” His comrades snatched the letter from him one night and read it aloud for the entire camp, laughing at Li-Ming’s careful penmanship, her love for dead poets no one cared about anymore. Or did they laugh at him?
Wang pretended not to hear Xiaodong.
“Mr. Poet, get your lazy ass up! You have to see this.” It was so early Xiaodong’s mustache was not yet combed into its desired shape; instead, it was bushy and morning-rustled like a wild animal. Whatever Xiaodong wanted to see must have been worth missing his grooming rituals.
Wang stood, begrudgingly, his beizi wrapped around him, an overstuffed winter kimono.
Once outside their shallow cave with its makeshift tents, Xiaodong directed Wang’s attention toward a flock of red-crowned cranes29 that had landed on an outcropping below. The villagers, likewise, amassed. As greedy as a pack of wild dogs, hunched and devout, the men and women scoured the yellow earth for small stones, for pebbles light but hard and rounded enough to spring from their slingshots.
“What are they…?” Wang asked Xiaodong, but as quickly as the words frosted the cold, the villagers raised their shots, leveling their gazes. The cranes, likely resting after a night migrating the chilled western skies, were entirely caught off-guard by this amassing human front. In martial unison, the villagers gleefully released their rubber slingshots, arching improvised bullets toward the cliffs.
The pebbles ricocheted off the rocks around Wang and Xiaodong, puffing yellow dust into the morning air. The cranes reacted slowly, flapping their heavy white wings and attempting to lift their bodies into the sky. One by one they took to the air, successfully avoiding the shots of the villagers, soaring over village streets, weaving shadows down alleyways, along the silt-heavy Wei River. Wang never realized how beautiful the scene could be from here—on most days he was preoccupied with the morning’s tasks (shaving his face over a pot of campfire-heated water heated, using that same pot to warm rice gruel kept overnight in a cave)—now, his gaze followed the cranes, how easily they traversed this landscape. He felt a strange expression cresting his face: a smile rising as the birds flew over the horizon, as the villagers’ pebbles, late to the chase, seared the wind, missing their targets. Wang’s beizi loosened and the warmth of his body filled the air surrounding him. Fly birds, fly. His bare shoulders donned the cloaked heat of the rising sun.
.
Fei. To fly.30
Wang watched as the cranes departed, unperturbed by the pebbles, leaving white feathers drifting over rocks, evidence of an evening’s roost.
But no, Wang suddenly realized. As he stepped closer to the edge, toes enjoying the warmth of sun-swept soil, he saw below, tucked beneath an overhang, a pair remained. They stood side by side, hobbling like nearly-felled trees and flapping their large, white wings unsuccessfully. Their necks careened in an unexpected dance, disbelieving this fate—how could they not summon the strength for the one instinctual motion they’d known all their lives? A bird without flight. What was a bird without flight?
“You know,” Xiaodong held his fat, dry palm to Wang’s face so close he could smell breakfast’s wilted leeks. “A bird in your hand is worth a hundred in the forest!” He yelped, joining the whooping villagers who only now realized they’d injured at least one of the cranes. They packed their slingshots into the worn front pockets of their cotton-padded Mao jackets and climbed the cliffs to the rocks where the cranes danced the dance of the wounded: one crane’s wing drooped listlessly to its side as if unhinged, the other coiled an injured leg into his bod
y, hopped awkwardly. As the hopping crane edged closer to his partner, he nudged his long neck into his partner’s wing, his crimson head growing a brighter red.
Xiaodong crouched beside Wang, searched for a rock to throw at the crane’s head.
“Help me,” Xiaodong pleaded without looking up, pulling on Wang’s pant leg. “C’mon, we’ll be able to eat bird meat for a week!” He scaled the rocks toward the cranes and the cluster of villagers.
They shouted for Wang to join. They wanted his help. But as the cranes interlocked their long black necks, as the sound of the masses burrowed through the cliff walls and to Wang, to the birds, he already knew: What use was there in helping? All this too like it happened before, was happening always—at river banks, precipices, Wang would forget his name, his tongue curling resolutely to reach for a familiar syllable, to run itself over the tip of slick teeth, searching, probing. He could be anyone.
He could be Zhang.
Or Wen.
Or Du.
Or Deng.
Or Sheng.
He could be Xiaodong with a wife at home stewing long-life potatoes in the kitchen, meticulously tending to the son’s latest skinned knee, snipping the boy’s overgrown hair by candlelight to save for a later date. For what?
“For what, Xiaodong?” he shouted to this man who was neither friend nor enemy but something more dangerous: the in between.
For this?
For the sound a dying bird makes?
For the sound of a villager gripping a knife, its silver reflecting the sun like a river’s surface?
A knife so sharp you see the toothy-edged glint, hear pulling flesh out and away from the body in mechanical motions, frenzied stabbings that seem to say:
Shhhhhhhhh, be still, shhhhhh, this won’t hurt one bit.
Wang Guanmiao simply stood above the strange unfolding of events, watching the world careen on with its ceaseless actions. He didn’t think of his mother, or the future he would one day make with the woman he thought he’d lost to wind and Weifang, a city whose name he knew but not its springtime smells nor sunset architectures. For now, he was simply himself, or better put, he simply was. A man breathing into the cold morning a breath that would become visible and then, as if undesiring (undeserving?) of an existence in this world, would disappear. This was the most and least Wang could be in a moment when he was called to action but couldn’t act. If he’d known this was a minute, more precisely, a collection of seconds upon which he would later muse, build regret, rebuild an entire story upon, a scaffolding of words forming sentences and then forming thoughts to etch into his limbs like an oracle bone’s fine markings, maybe he would’ve acted differently. Maybe he would’ve said, “Cao… you fools.” Maybe he would have scaled the rocks. Would have told his daughter, the one he didn’t know yet: “This was my biggest failure.” But was it?31
The sound of a wing flapping. The sound of a wing falling from its body like a leaf. Feathers clouding the sky, cirrus and cumulous. White against yellow. Or red. Or brown. He has forgotten the colors of the sunrise on a date he has mistaken for another but the sound of that wing jimmying loose is one he could recall for a thousand years. The sound of all manners of flight crashing to earth in a violent pummeling of sky and cloud.
He cupped his hands atop his ears. Closed his eyes. He saw red.
Eyes cautiously opening: Xiaodong waved to the remaining villagers watching below. This victory was his. Everyone’s. He egged on the massacre like a crazed revolutionary. But isn’t that what they were? What they’d signed on to become in the years leading to this? They’d agreed in the daily meetings on the factory floors with the smell of burnt metal scalding their nostrils, in the school gymnasiums crowded with the heat of bodies and boiled words, on the city streets freshly swept in preparation for the Chairman’s anticipated visit, in the danwei mess halls where they whispered the latest gossip about Aunt Feng, Aunt Huang, Uncle Xu.
Li-Ming: you’d never believe the sight.
Li-Ming: we do horrible things when we’re hungry.
Li-Ming: are we ever forgiven?
Wang’s fingers pulsed, winter-thin blood rushing to warm his city skin to remind his body where it was, what was needed to survive. The wounded crane’s partner, the one with the limp leg who witnessed the massacre of his mate, stood feebly, legs squeezed between the hands of the stoutest villager. Wang recognized this man from his work in the fields a day earlier—the man was missing all but one of his teeth (the front one below his left nostril, but even this was rotted to a pulpy root) and his skin was puckered by a life staring into the desert sun. He might as well have been a raisin.
Yes, it was the raisin villager whose hands, chapped and purple, clung to the surviving crane’s black, wiry legs—fingers blistering purple in the cold, bird legs running on air but losing the fight—as the bird flapped its giant white wings thinking this alone was the strongest motion on earth. Survival was not a gift, but an obligation. Wang Guanmiao needed this bird to fly. With his long black neck arching backward and head copper in the morning sun, the bird twisted from the grasp of the raisin villager’s country-strong hands. He jabbed his beak into the man’s forearm, but he barely flinched. This was a man who knew hardship, had eaten bitterness—chi ku—and even a crane’s beak drawing blood couldn’t cause him to retreat. The wings expanded, cloaking the raisin villager in bird shadow:
Xiaodong’s chest was dappled in dark crane blood, his hands wrapped around the collapsed bird’s limp, lifeless tube of a neck.
“Give me a knife!” he shouted. “I will slit its throat!” His fingertips were stained mustard; the cliffs that would take years to wash out of his skin. Yet Xiaodong wasn’t thinking of the years ahead. His was a present goal. He looked like no one Wang had known and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling Xiaodong was someone he’d always known. That this day, this death, was happening always, everywhere. How can we extricate one moment from the next, the way a word is intractably linked to that which came before and that which will follow, or a child is tied to his parents as well as his own progeny, or… we could devise a thousand similes here, but what’s the point? Watching Xiaodong strangling the bird, Wang didn’t move. He didn’t prevent his comrade from doing that which Wang knew he himself would come to regret and therefore, he is always not moving, not following, not doing—at the same time that he is moving, and following, and doing, and dying.32
Indeed, if Wang knew everything of that and every moment to follow, he’d know Xiaodong would later grow old in a cramped, humid apartment in Deshengmen, would run a desperate campaign for neighborhood counsel only to lose to the defamed-then-reclaimed Mrs. Xu, then die of lung cancer at seventy-three, never to meet his first—and only—grandson.
But, Wang didn’t know this and he didn’t run to the rescue of the crane as it leered, flapping its last beats against the stock-strong body of the raisin villager, the newly-present strength of Xiaodong. Wang didn’t tell the crane which way to fly. Didn’t explain how he could escape this uncertain destiny we all face some day, some morning or afternoon or evening or midnight. We may be surrounded by others but then, we are always alone in this too.33
In the valley below, sunlight ricocheted off hay rooftops, off yellow-earthen walls of homes that would soon crumble, be rebuilt using the materials of the nation’s newest modernity—cement blocks, copper pipes. Children sat on door stoops, dragging sticks through powdery dust that rose in dandelions above the streets. Old taitai, white heads shining silver-blue, teetered on too-small feet, knees bowed irrevocably, incapable of knowing a solid, foot-sure stride.
For now, the world beneath them was afire, and the tip of that flame was the red rising atop the last crane’s feathered head. Xiaodong crawled to the perch on which the raisin villager kneeled; he’d killed one and was hungry for another. The less-injured crane’s legs struggled within the stout man’s stouter hands and were slipping, ever so slightly, away from this tenuous grasp with each pump of the bird’s cave-wide wi
ngs.
Xiaodong reached for the knife tucked beside the raisin villager’s hip then raised his hand and directed the blade at the bird’s bare, heaving chest.
Without thinking, Wang lifted his hands above his head and clapped.
The sound echoed, spilling onto the shadowed valley floor, onto children slapping sticks, old taitai teetering to the rations store, eager villagers who raised their slingshots and happily allowed red rivulets to run down their forearms, to stain their clothing in blossoming petals like the first words of a good story. How deeply and lovingly they clung to those stains, believing it would heal them of every injurious act they’d committed. Wang raised his hands and clapped again.
The sound was enough for the raisin villager to raise his eyes briefly in Wang’s direction. Wang never knew if it was the unexpected vision of his razor-thin shadow blocking the sun, or his tanned, balding head haloed by a golden morning, but whatever it was—the sound, the sight, the insanity of this interruption—caused the raisin villager to lose his grip on the crane.
In one framed instant, the sky above them, above the village, above Xiaodong, the raisin villager, and all the villagers paused with their knives dug deeply into the pink-gray flesh of their only kill was white with winter morning:
White with flapping wings rimmed in charcoal, black neck stretching toward the swelling sun:
White as if forgotten:
White, a color in a poetry book she’d one day give him, blank spaces around words falling into an abyss of silence. Wang wanted to unfurl his own feathered wings, to step onto that invisible air and remember the feeling of falling, of flight.
But it was still morning. And he was not a crane. Not even a bird. In fact, it was just another morning when a flock of migrating cranes, known only to the villagers by the red-green-gold stories painted on the walls of Yuquan Temple, found these headless yellow mountains in the deserts of Gansu, to a May 7th Camp filled with city-blooded Beijingers ravenous for the once-familiar taste of meat, charred skin and chewy tendons.
Empire of Glass Page 16